Posted: Wed 03 Oct 2012, 13:33 Post subject:
Puppy L4Subject description: I just want to throw this out to the dogs...

My view is that linux, being monolithic, was obsolete before it was created. Since then, more than two decades have passed and every other system is microkernel-based.

I am also highly critical that the Linux world required corporate coders to come to them in GNU or FOSS terms, which most could not. Thus, drivers are problematic.

The replacement I am suggesting is L4, which is in billions of devices, but hidden because there is no "shell app." Android is being ported to L4, but Android is not what GNU/Linux represents, which is a shell over a kernel. GNU/Linux also represents the proper development environment: GCC.

Puppy could change that, because Puppy is an OS and not some cheesy "app." And, puppy would in no simple terms be the "top dog."

I think the first step would be to extend puppy in two directions:

a) continue to make it accessible for the lowest cost and maintenance machines (where are increasingly the android type) to support the best users--who are generally young and broke

b) make a development environment in that context, for those reasons.

About me: I am completing a psych masters and I will be working with youth. Prior, I was a truck driver because I got forced out of my job (by the tech crash of y2k) and home (by the terror attack on downtown Manhattan).

This whole decade has been reflecting on why things are not working out like they were supposed to (1988-2003) and what to do about it. I think puppy L4 would be a step in the right direction.

Thanks, it would be a first -- I have been talking about alternative kernels since before the "9/11" terror attack as I remember fielding ExOS and LibOS at a meeting in the Sybase HQ in one of the World Trade Center towers (targets of the famous attack).

I recall being pretty-much "shut down" by a woman who scolded me for attempting to kill-off the poor penguin, Tux.

As a side note: I suppose that is a bad omen when people start "personifying" (or anthropomorphizing) operating systems! Things went south shortly as the tech market crashed, and then the buildings themselves collapsed, and then the US economy switched to mortgage built homes, causing another collapse in 2007-8. My last tech job was writing CDS docs, the instrument that facilitated the 2007-8 crash, but I don't feel guilty because I did not know what that meant, though I had some questions.

There is shell material available that I have not implemented, but as I attempt stress, I no longer do this professionally, but I would like to collaborate. As every other OS is microkernel-based, and every other kernel can load independent drivers, I assume that Linux's weak point, poor choice of drivers, is because it is monolithic. Efficiency issues have been public for nearly a decade: Linux runs faster on L4 than it does independently. Seems that the layer that Linux supplies to L4 could be an actual L4-friendly code.

A major advantage would be to evolve shell; it has been fundamentaly the same since the 70s, which shows it to be good, but nothing is perfect, and it certainly is not OO.

In this vein, the major problem I have encountered is "troll bashing" leveraged with metacognitions such as Linux has "loadable modules." In my mind (especially from the psych perspective, my career now) is that troll-bashing behaviors are not all that different than anthropomorphizing Tux. Perhaps a little more psychotic than schizophrenic.

l4 is widely distributed, and has been ported to Android, which runs on Linux, (if you didn't know).

Here is some text I put elsewhere with a couple links. The last link actually concludes that paravirtualizing Linux is the way to go, but after some really good ideas, I missed the final leap. Drivers are the problem, but also for Linux, (but not Apple or MS), so how do you somehow intercept Apple and MS drivers, or, perhaps the solution is to create a high-level kit from which any driver can be created. Seeing how much android is out there, and that Windows 8 imitates it...

This link is good because it is a head scratcher
http://alopex.li/wiki/L4FiascoTutorial

And this one is from the source in Dresden, which points us back to Linux:
http://alopex.li/wiki/L4FiascoTutorial

Which actually may be a way to go for PL, but doesn't solve the driver problem, but might work with Android devices.

Hi John Bessa,
sounds like you have real history with the issue. As a non-programmer, I tentatively suggest you might find support from forum member iguleder (Dimak Rasner) who was/is a prolific contributor until becoming so frustrated with Puppy/Linux/Woof 's organisational structure, started his own variant http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=75753. Although it is quite like me to misread code-smiths' motivations entirely, I think he might find L4 implementation a particularly worthwhile challenge. Hope I'm not muddying the waters._________________Toowoomba Linux Community
http://groups.google.com/group/toowoombalinux

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